Review: Finger Physics

Finger Physics is a brilliant little app on the iPhone and iPod touch. As the name suggests this title has you using your fingers to manipulate objects, which will be affected by one of the main rules of physics: Gravity. You can expect to be balancing a few things in this game; however, that is only a small portion of its Curriculum Vitae: there are a few other things up the metaphorical sleeve.

Finger Physics is split up into different stages, 24 including the tutorial and a bonus stage. In each of the 24 stages there are nine levels, if you complete six out of these nine levels in a stage then the next stage will unlock. Each of the levels you play will be timed, upon completion this time awards you a different colour stars: Bronze, Silver and gold. The faster that you complete the level, the better colour star you get! Simples! Even if you can manage to Gold star all 216 levels that come with the game, which in itself is quite an achievement, don’t fret! There is more! There are the appropriately named Pinky, Middle and Thumb DLC packs; for a mere 59p these level packs contain 27 more levels and a few extras like new kinds of objects; A good deal in my opinion.

Unique gameplay is what any iPhone game needs, more specifically an ability to make you want to come back and complete more of the game. This game definitely has that ability; I’ve had Finger Physics on my iPod touch for a little while now and I have just kept coming back for more. One of the main reasons is because every single level is different; yes you read that right – 216 unique levels. There are 5 different type of levels that you’ll come across during the game, the first one you’ll meet is getting an egg from one part of the level into a basket that has invariably been placed over the opposite side of the map. The next new type of level has you balancing objects; these can start really quite easy but start searching for the thinking cap when magnetic shapes are introduced. These blocks manage to add a bit of difficulty without it being a massive problem, it only really requires a bit of forward thinking. The third level type is virtually the same but has a height that you have to achieve to succeed the level, obviously, you have to put in a bit more time to line shapes up properly and cross your fingers sometimes to get the gold. The fourth kind of level is a lot more complex than the other four; you also see a lot less of these, thankfully. These are a real pain, you have to balance blocks that rise to the top against blocks that fall to the bottom of the screen. The last level type is to build a tower as big as you can in the time that’s given on the counter, nothing really inotive there but it just adds even more diversity. You can’t complain on the content!

There is only one real problem that I have with this game: the difficulty. I have found that the difficulty doesn’t know whether it’s getting harder or easier sometimes. Quite late on in the game, around stage 19, I was stumped a couple of times, eventually clearing the puzzles I found myself completely baffled by one level. This is to be expected, you may be thinking, you can’t complete every level first time. At the time I would have agreed with you, that is until I came upon the next three levels, these were like being transported back to the tutorial again. Slightly patronising, I thought, especially so late in the game having proved your worth before. Don’t let that put you off though! This game is indeed very good: the graphics are bright, colourful and a pleasure to look at; the music is well thought out and doesn’t feel repetitive plus you can listen to your own music; the gameplay is great and for the price you get an awful lot of content, plenty to keep you going for 4-5 hours. There are similar games on Xbox live and PSN where you pay a whole ten smackers for something that won’t hold your attention for as long as this. I highly recommend this game; download it, as soon as possible, you definitely won’t regret it!